Salvation into Nation: Topic Modeling Early Modern Economic Writings

Abstract

Early modern economic thought is often left out of histories of economic thought, but it was an important inflection point in the development of the modern science of economics. Using network clustering and topic modeling, this research describes the subjects covered in the economic literature of the early modern era and how they change over time using a sample of 2,353 economics texts written from 1550 to 1700s. Topic modeling of the corpus produces sixty-six distinct topics. These topics are clustered using network science methods that reveal five main themes: trade, politics, travel, religion, and husbandry. Longitudinal analysis of the prevalence of topics shows increases in politics and decreases in travel, religion, and husbandry. The results also allow a more precise sense of when those shifts take place than has previously been established, implying that computational methods hold great promise for revealing new information and insights about the evolution and transformation of economic thought over time.

Keywords

• topic modeling
• early modern era
• mercantilism
• computational social science